What’s the point?

“An even more impressive instance of remote debugging occurred on NASA’s 1998 Deep Space 1 mission. A half year after the space craft launched, a bit of Lisp code was going to control the spacecraft for two days while conducting a sequence of experiments. Unfortunately, a subtle race condition in the code had escaped detection during ground testing and was already in space. When the bug manifested in the wild--100 million miles away from Earth--the team was able to diagnose and fix the running code, allowing the experiments to complete. One of the programmers described it as follows:

’Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem.’”